Oh, damn! Beta!

I confess that I have always liked that quote from Snake on the Simpsons and have been dying for a reason to use it.
Now I have several. I have gone beta happy this week.
My notebook is running the newest Windows Live Messenger Beta, which is fun.
I'm also running (as of yesterday afternoon) Beta 2 of Office 2007 and that is really cool. The UI changes alone are worth the price of admission (metaphorically speaking, it is a free public beta after all). As soon as my downloader starts behaving again I'm going to pull down the installers for Visio, Project, OneNote and Groove.

That isn't the coolest beta I've gotten into lately though... A few weeks back, I threw my hat in the ring to test Google-hosted mail. Imagine my surprise when I was issued an invite.
I changed my MX records, and have been accessing my mail via the hosted Gmail interface since yesterday.
I have to say... It's nice.
My previous host was not too keen on spam filtering. The filtering I am getting with the hosted GMail is damn near perfect.
The solution also allows for Google-chat based IM for all users within your domain. That's a nice bonus, especially since any Jabber client can be used to access it from outside of the browser.
I'll going to be blogging more about these betas on and off over the next little while, so stay tuned for some bleeding edge geek commentary.